Jhumpa Lahiri, Big in Bulgaria

Jhumpa Lahiri’s fans positively adore her. Not just her work—her. During a discussion this morning with our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, sighs of appreciation could be heard whenever Lahiri said something particularly resonant, which was often. I hadn’t realized just how beloved she is, but fifteen minutes into the session I’d fallen along with the rest of the crowd.

Walking home afterward, I tried to put my finger on the reason why. Yes, she’s eloquent and gentle, intelligent, humble—all endearing qualities—but there’s something else, something subtle. She has an uncanny ability to talk about uncertainty in a way that yields revelation—or, rather, to accept uncertainty as a condition of revelation. Describing her path to becoming a writer (she began writing stories around the age of five, quit around fourteen, and didn’t pick it up again until well into her twenties, while acquiring three M.A.s and a Ph.D., in Renaissance Studies), she emphasized over and over the “strangeness” of it all. She didn’t know “why” or “how” she decided to turn her story “Gogol,” which was published in the magazine in 2003, into a novel (“The Namesake”).

“Had you stopped or had you already decided to keep going with the story when you finished it?” Treisman asked.

“I had stopped,” Lahiri said. “But then I kept going.”

A similar sense of mystery surrounds the creation of her stories, many of which took her ten years to write. She would have the beginnings of an idea, which would remain vague until, one day, they would become clear. “It’s as if you are looking through a window, and then suddenly the window opens.” She thinks the ideas come from inside her head, but she thinks they might also come from outside.

Characters, too, have hidden origins. “It’s like leaves emerging in the spring. One day they are not there, the next they are.”

In fact, Lahiri finds her entire career somewhat inexplicable. “Writing is a fragile, difficult, strange pursuit that has to exist outside all other normal life expectations. Somehow for a writer, it does exist; but this very easily could not have happened for me.”

Even if the writing process remained a mystery at the end of the discussion, the reasons for Lahiri’s popularity had become clear. A man in his fifties stood up and took the microphone during the Q. & A.: “I am from Bulgaria,” he said, “and I would like to tell you how important your work is there. When the movie came out”—of “The Namesake”—“everyone loved it so much. I didn’t understand fully why they did until this day, when I saw you.”